Sunday, January 13, 2013

Some almost get it

Back in October, I reported that Pinterest's new strike system was just a sham to appear to content creators that they are serious about copyrights, all the while sending their users letters absolving them from responsibility and giving them a little pity party.

My Blessed Life blogger Patricia Logan reports having received those toothless "strike" letters from Pinterest.

I got a note from them saying that they had to remove one of my pins due to copyright infringement. "Oh it was nothing I did" they said, It was against a person who either pinned it from the beginning, or they re-pinned it from someone else who did the pinning.

Ms Logan, much to her credit, shows that she has more brains than Pinterest.

If you (the guys who thought of this concept) have this wonderful site, which is a big hit, how can you forget there is a copyright law that as old as dirt? [...] The folks in Washington are all over this, and would love to see courts active in slapping fines on people and shutting down sites that do not adhere to the laws of the land, especially something so trivial as a copyright law.

It's almost a miracle that Ms Logan is reaching the right conclusion despite Pinterest's attempts to convince her she'd done nothing wrong.

Now I'm just being picky, but this is where Ms Logan makes an incorrect assumption, and incorrect assumption that even copyright owners often make:

P.S: Document and give credit to the person or site you got it from always works too.

Crediting the source is not enough. You always have to ask for permission. Credit or not, many content providers do not want to have their content displayed on websites other than their own, because they derive their revenue from traffic - and Pinterest takes their traffic (and revenue) away.